Offred

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the gaps between the stories."

"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

"I am not her. I am myself."

"The Republic of Gilead, I said. And felt, rather than heard, a kind of silence, like static."

"I lift the laminated card, look at my face, look away."

"I want to be valued, in the way that I am mapped and counted and given a name."

"Things have shifted in me. I'm different. I'm not sure in what way."

"We were not supposed to know one another. We were supposed to be mothers, and nothing else."

"I knew nothing about her. You can't know about other people's lives."

"I am still alive."

"I don't want to breed anymore."

"I would like to be the air."

"We read in secret, in closets, in cellars, in empty boxes."

"I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me."

"A man in a bed is a man, no more, no less."

"Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you noticed."

"I'm alive, I'm still alive."

"I have tried to be more objective. I have tried to show what I know about her through my own eyes."

"What I must present as my history."

"My name is not Offred, I have another name, which nobody knows but myself."

"I sit in my chair and think about the word chair, because the word came before the thing, or at least alongside it."

"I want to feel what I'm supposed to feel."

"I don't know what's greater: the fear or the anger."

"We are two-legged wombs."

"I never knew what she wanted. Maybe she didn't know herself."

"He didn't know I could read. Nobody knew."

"I didn't know who I was anymore."

"Better never means better for everyone, it always means worse for some."

"I'm trying to think of a time when I felt real joy."

"We were the people who were not in the papers."